Trinity
by rapid-apathy
Summary: Sometimes, everything goes wrong. Kusuriuri/Kayo


**Author's Note**: This was written for the 'Girl Saves Boy' ficathon on LJ (girlsavesboyfic(dot)livejournal(dot)com), which is an annual ficathon in which all the stories feature a female character saving a male one. So I decided to write one for my favorite OTPs and it was a lot of fun.

**Warnings**: Contains disturbing imagery, violence and some language

O~O~O~O

The house was further than she thought and the road had quickly ended into a flooded rice field. The gray and blue water cut through with bright green snaking trails, winding across like a skewed grid. Only two paths offered themselves and she thought about perhaps just waiting there instead of taking the wrong one. She crouched down and sighed while looking ahead and tried to think which one he would have taken. Looking at the paths she stared down each one until something caught her eye to one in particular. The powdery white gravel of crushed shells and tender shoots atop one pressed uniformly into the dark earth. Two widely placed rectangular wedged indentations.

The evening was quickly approaching and she had to push on quickly. She bit her lip and sighed. He had said he'd be back quickly and told her to wait for him on the main road but it had been at least five hours and he hadn't returned. She thought it perhaps silly to worry about him and knew he'd tease her later for it but she did anyway. The approaching night offered little choice but to find him as it was. The area was desolate and she couldn't remember the last time they had seen evidence of civilization having been near there other than the existence of the road itself.

Through the winding pathways between the flooded patterns of earth she followed for what must have been an hour perhaps more. The hills that had seemed much further away she almost was upon now, approaching the cul-de-sac valley at their base. A mist hung low and thick, clinging to the base of the mountains. Cold and eerily silent.

They hadn't been on long together. Few months perhaps. She didn't have anywhere to go in particular and he didn't seem to mind the company and neither said anything and kept moving on from the crowded streets of Edo. And so they were as people tend to fall into routines without much thought or plan. At night they sometimes talked or shared a pipe. They ate together and made each other laugh. She accompanied him sometimes to help him sell his wares and on one or two occasions he specifically asked her not to accompany him she would know why.

This was one of those occasions.

Around the edge of the tree line to the vast forest ahead an obvious cut out could be seen at the end of the flooded marshes, short symmetrically placed trees once an orchard stood dwarfed by their wild cousins. Blackened rot and leaf bare. Wild grass hip high. She stopped and looked around but saw nothing else but thick forest in all other directions. At the far end she could just barely make out what she was sure was the back of a house through the haze of blue mist.

The orchard was like a narrow path sliced into the forest, no more than eight rows across. There was a slight trail left in the grass where someone had walked before and she followed down it. Off to one side old weather exposed boxes once used for gathering fruit. Bamboo ladders black and swollen with rot. Cracked wooden poles with rusted metal fittings. Dust laden spider webs cocooning everything.

An uneasy feeling settled across her chest. Everything abandoned and left in molder. She considered turning back for a moment but looked around instead.

On the other side of the orchard obscured by overgrown brush there were long lengths of wood and bamboo leaving an abstract suggestion of what was once perhaps a fence. It caught her eye and she had the sudden urge to follow it. She would have more time to think on why later. She crossed the dead rows of dead woods over to it, pushing the grass down with the side of her foot step by step through the unsteady earth. The fencing went into the forest and seemed to lead nowhere. Piles of ancient weeds cut and dumped there with trash and scrap from who knows how long ago. Behind a grouping of trees invisible from the orchard she came upon a small building, not much bigger than a common tool shed or privy peeking out with wooden shingles on the sagging top, crumbling and burdened with lichen and leaf litter. Frayed soiled rope ends spilled out the bottom of the door reaching out in spread arrays. Some lying out in great length, winding about the front of the building like a group of snakes loosely coiled about. Flies swarmed the structure and surrounding wood, their agitated wings buzzing. As she got closer she could see that the dirty rope was actually soaked wet.

She walked up to the door to get a closer look and tried to open the door. It was secured with a metal slip latch on the outside. She looked around to see if anyone was near and not seeing anyone she flipped the latch up and wedged the door open a crack. An overpowering stench. She began choking and had to cover her face with her hand. The door was swollen shut and she had to force it open with a solid thrust from her shoulder and even then it only opened enough for her just to see inside. Walls with black and brown spray patterns so thick it was sagging upon the wall, curling, cracking and slouching upon its own coagulation in different stages of desiccation. Piles of the rope bundled on the floor, blackened and encrusted in decaying gore alive and moving through an undulating mass of ants and larvae and creatures of ineffable nightmares. Clumps of long black hair stuck in wooden planks. A chain.

Oh no, she said. Oh God, she repeated over and over and slowly stepped back, stumbling over the rope and falling onto her bottom with a spine shocking thud to the ground. Her body shook and she tried to repress the urge to vomit but failed. Maybe he already knew. But what if he didn't. Couldn't know. She tried to breathe. Her entire body caught with a seizing fear. What to do. She shuffled to her feet and slammed the door back shut and locked it like how she had found it. She clutched a small dagger tucked in the front of her obi and tore into the orchard and kept going towards the farm house. She looked into a small barred window but saw nothing. Rope hung limp and swaying from the thatching above covering the outer walls like lifeless ivy. It spooled upon the ground and she tripped over it as she went around the side of the building until she noticed that the entire ground was covered in tendrils of rope. Grass growing up out and between it like a new soil. Bended lengths of hundreds draped over the towering gable of the roof spilling down the rotten thatching and over the sides of the house disappearing into the dense grass.

A loud crashing sound came from around towards the front and she slid along the side of the building until she reached the front. No one there either. Another sound. Popping and snapping of stressed wood. Coming from one of the small servants quarters in the distance. She went to step forward towards it but only found herself back in front of the farmhouse again. Her heart began to pound so fast it was fluttering. Another step but again she was only to find herself where she had started. She tried sliding open the front door of the house. It opened upon the dilapidated building hidden near the orchard. Blood reflecting on the smoke blackened walls. The putrid smell of offal. A woman in the middle of the floor not three feet away, bound by the neck and stomach hung open, its contents pushed forth from a cut down her midline like a carcass being field dressed. An infant crawling over the body, mute and featureless. Behind her the farmhouse was gone, the sliding door as well. A box configuration of the building with no depth she could touch enclosed her. A disorienting blur flooded her vision, all pitch and horizon distorted.

Intense vertigo spread through her and she started to feel like she was going to fall. She had to close her eyes and felt her balance slip out from under her. She started to cry but closed her eyes tighter and took a deep breath. and composed herself and kept mentally repeating that it wasn't real. It's an illusion. Can you handle it? Seeing it all the time? Do you even want to? Why would you? All of the reasons she had told herself not to come with him interspersed her thoughts and an intense urge to run took hold of her.

When she opened her eyes again the corpse was gone and it was just her standing alone in a blackness with no end or form. She squatted down and put her hands to the ground to steady herself. She swept her arms out trying to find the door or a wall but only touched something slick and she quickly tucked her hand between her stomach and thighs and gripped onto whatever false security the dagger could provide. She called out his name into the silence and tried to quiet the blood pounding in her ears to see if she could hear anything at all.

For awhile there was nothing. Minutes went by with nothing but a deafening silence. A sudden crashing sound made her jump and scream in surprise only for it to be followed by more silence. She tried to concentrate on her breathing. Voices? No, nothing. Absence of all sound reverberated around her making her ears play tricks on her. Soon another sound, but this one a familiar tinkle of bells. Her eyes jumped open and she called out to it. Again, she heard it. The endless negative space around her began to shake with such force her breath lost her and she heard the bells again and slowly crawled towards it calling out. A wind gusted as a rush of ofuda encircled around her. She looked behind her and saw the inside of an unfamiliar room, small and cramped and dark. When she looked forward again she was no longer in the confines of darkness, but on her hands and knees behind Kusuriuri in a rundown house, facing two men with an incredulous look on their faces.

"Pay her no mind," he said. He directed the ofuda with his hands out and up to the ceiling, blanketing the entire surface.

"Kusuriuri-san—" she started before he yanked her up by her elbow and pulled her further back into the room until she was in the farthest corner near the only door. His face was stained with sweat and dirt and he looked exhausted. "Are you alright?"

"We just want out of here." A large man squatting near the fireplace off center of the room. Narrow eyes enfolded into puffy half moons of fat under each eye. He slouched, his great weight pulling him down in the front making his shoulders hang heavy and his back slightly humped.

"And if she can get in, then we can get out," he said standing up, his height dwarfing both of them. In his hand long metal tongs he pulled out from the ashes. "I knew you were pulling somethin' here."

The building creaked and moaned under an invisible pressure, fissures shot up the plaster walls sending a cloud of suffocating dust through the air.

"That woman killed herself and that's all there is to it. If you here to try to get me to admit to something I didn't do, then you can just get the fuck out of my way like I already told ya to."

The sword tucked in Kusuriuri's obi remained silent. Kayo started shaking her head and stood on her tip toes to whisper in his ear, "He's lying."

"What then."

She told him everything. The rope. The shed in the woods. The corpses. The mention of the infant seemed to be the final piece of the puzzle he was deciphering in his mind as a wry smile curled his lips when she said it.

She was interrupted by a loud creaking sound and everyone in unison looked up to the ceiling. Little bits of plaster and splinter wood dust snowing down. The ofuda covering the beams distorted and began to glow red.

A child's rejected feelings. A woman's despair. Jealousy. Rage. Kayo listened as he talked it out; every connection came together, every lie untangled finally. She had not committed suicide but had been strangled with a rope and butchered in his anger. She was pregnant and he suspected her. The other man, he disposed of the body? No, he watched it happened and did nothing to stop it. He had an uncanny ability to read a situation he was years detached from, or perhaps he had seen so many of the same tragedies that they all fell into predictable patterns of human misery and evil.

The sword accepted with a loud clack of its jaws as a beam in the wall snapped in half and the entire side of the house came in nearly folded in half separating from the ceiling, leaving a gaping opening to the outside. Ropes gathered behind began spilling inside slithering along the walls and dropping to the floor. Kusuriuri laid a new barrier around the opening but the force coming from the mononoke pushed him back, sliding him upon his feet.

In the side of her eye through the haze of dust she saw the men move but it was already too late. The smaller man came from behind swinging a hand spade and the other came forward grabbing Kayo and rolled to the ground and came up with his arm wrapped around her neck, the tongs still grasped in his hand. Kusuriuri jumped back avoiding the blow from the spade and swung his leg back tripping the shorter man. He faced the man holding Kayo but before he could do anything the man unexpectedly dropped her and rushed at him with the tongs, nearly overtaking him and distracting his field of vision long enough for the shorter man to pick up his sickle and land a quick solid blow to the back of Kusuriuri's head. A revolting cracking sound and a cry of pain. His body slumped over falling to the ground.

The large man kicked him in the back as he lay motionless. The other went rummaging through the items strewn across the filthy floor, trying to find something. All of this happening within seconds. She screamed and moved towards Kusuriuri but one of the men reached and grabbed her arm.

"Not so fast, bitch," he hissed, throwing her back to the ground. The man rummaging called to the other man and tossed him what turned out to be a length of rope. He caught it and looked back towards Kayo. Kayo looked at the man at the man who threw the rope and saw him grabbing a large bladed sickle.

The man with the rope stepped over towards her and grabbed her by the top of her hair. He yanked her head back and dragged her across the floor by it and she reached up and clawed into his hand and forearm trying to get him to release her and to take the weight of her body off her scalp. He only got maybe a foot or two before he screamed and cursed and let her go as her nails dug through his skin and into the tendons on the inside of his wrist. She clambered away but he grabbed her by the back of the head and landed his knees onto the side of her leg pinning her to the ground. A sharp knee cap twisted into her. His one hand was wrapped in her hair the other held her left arm down to the ground. His knees pressed into her thighs and he slid one knee between her legs as he tried to roll her body onto her stomach. Her heart pounded harder and she screamed for him to get off of her. Reality became revoltingly clear to her that they were going to rape her and then kill her and that there was no way out and no one to help. She cried out in pain as she felt her body being crushed but her right arm tucked underneath could still move despite the massive weight of the man and she felt around into her obi and pulled out her small dagger and she thrust it into the man on top of her with as much force as she could. It landed into the upper left of his gut and she felt a resistance against the blade at first only for it to rip through something fibrous and quickly sink in to the hilt with a sickening ease. He screamed and released her at once and clutched the dagger handle hanging out of his body. Blood soaked his clothes and ran down his arm. His mouth hung open and his eyes squinted in pain and horror. You bitch, he was yelling, you fucking bitch. She didn't wait to see what he'd do and she quickly crawled across the floor to an unconscious exorcist.

The other man had a sickle in hand was trying to keep the man with the dagger on his feet but he looked at them and she knew it was only a matter of minutes before they were either killed by the man or by the mononoke that was steadily squeezing the building inward. The building trembled under the pressure and a loud crack came from the ceiling as the entire structure began to lean to one side. The remaining planks comprising the ceiling fell like matchsticks, slamming and bouncing as they hit the floor, the men, Kayo and Kusuriuri.

"You idiots," she yelled. "Idiots," she kept saying over and over cradling Kusuriuri's head trying to keep the debris from hitting him. "He is the only one who can kill it."

The men were crawling towards the door which had snapped and broke out of its tracks. She didn't imagine they'd get far but felt a relief that they were leaving. But now she began to panic. She carefully rolled his head to the side. Blonde hair matted with red and black. She felt along it lightly threading her fingers into the tacky mass around the back of his skull. He let out a small groan when she got to the injury and she apologized and parted his hair as best she could and lightly pressed her fingers against it to see if it was broken open. It felt solid and smooth underneath as far as she could tell. Along the top a large gash in the scalp and she hastily pulled out her obiage and tightly wound it around his head to try to stop the bleeding. Around them the building creaked and swayed. She lightly tapped his cheeks and said his name over and told him to wake up but blue eyes only opened intermittently and he mumbled something she couldn't understand.

She knelt behind him and reached under his arms and pulled him up but he was incredibly heavy and she groaned with trying to position his dead weight. She managed to get him into a semi-seated position, resting his back against her chest supporting his head between her shoulder and neck.

"Come on Kusuriuri-san, it's time to work now." She took the sword out of his obi and placed it in his hand. "I don't know what else to do, so please, _help me_."

She put her hand over his and held up the sword hoping for some kind of reaction. Nothing. She held it out further, straightening her arm as far as it could go trying to emulate a stance she had seen him do before. Nothing. She didn't know what to do. If he transformed would he even wake up? She tried to think. The ofuda around on the wreckage around them began to disintegrate, its weak field completely blown away now as the structure's walls and roof were knocked clear across the yard with a wind so powerful she had to cover their faces to breathe. They sat amongst the fallen debris. Totally exposed now. Panic flooded over her. "Please," she was begging, "please."

The incredible gusts the creature made it nearly impossible to see. Impossible to take a breath. She knew they only had seconds or maybe no seconds at all. She yelled for him to say the words to release the sword, begged him one last time but he couldn't and suddenly it was upon them.

Holding the sword gripped in both their hands out in front of them, she shut her eyes and buried her face into his hair and she screamed out the words because if she didn't they were dead and she had nothing else.

~O~O~O~

He awoke to find himself looking at an unfamiliar ceiling and to a pain he could have not prepared for shooting through his eyes to the back of his head down his neck and through his back. He tried to lift his hand to his face but found it took a few tries to garner the strength. His arm trembled a bit when he moved. Everything heavy and confused. He touched his fingers lightly along his cheeks and up to his forehead and he felt wrappings of cloth secured around his entire head. He looked at the sleeve hanging from his elbow. Not his clothes. He tried to sit up but as his body tensed in order to move the pain was unbearable.

He laid his hand gingerly out around him, testing his surroundings in the dark. A wad of bedding wedged under his bended knees supporting his lower back. More bedding wadded and rolled all around him, pushed up under his back, shoved between his legs, cradling his neck and limbs like one would arrange to keep an infant from rolling away. His legs and arms were tightly wound about in more material. His feet were freezing.

His hand knocked over something off to the side of the bed and it made a loud clamor as it bounced against the floor and rolled and righted itself. His head whipped towards the sound reflexively and a pain that took his breath away seized his entire skull and a loud groan clawed out of his dry throat.

"Kusuriuri-san? Oh! Don't move, hold on." He heard Kayo's cracked voice as she scurried in the dark. "Hold on, just a minute."

A flurry of movement next to his head. Things being dragged and opened. The scraping clacks of flint and the burst and fade of flame. The dim light got brighter as she brought over a short iron candle stick and put it nearby.

She rubbed her face and kneeled right up against his shoulder and looked down. "Kusuriuri-san?"

"Kayo-san."

Her eyes went wide and she bent down bringing her face to his to have a better look. Her long disheveled hair hanging in his face and neck. She brought her hand to his forehead and placed her open palm on it and all across his face as if checking if he were real or not. "Are you awake-awake?"

"…Kayo-san."

"Yeah?"

"Why so close?"

She instantly burst into tears. He tried to apologize but she started blubbering out how relieved she was. She told him how he'd been out for nearly a week and how he would only intermittently come into a false consciousness, unable to fully awake, outwardly aggressive towards her and moving about in the bed with no real cognition. "That's why you're kind of swaddled in here like a baby," she explained.

"I see."

An uncomfortable feeling crept over him as he listened to her explain things he had done that he had absolutely no recollection of. He had a bad head wound, she told him. His ribs were probably broken too and from the amount of pain it caused to simply breathe he agreed with that presumption. He tried to remember what had happened and could only recall broken fragments.

Kayo kept talking, a never ending torrent of words of everything that had happened. She laid her head against his chest and started crying again when she explained what had happened after he'd been knocked out. Everything she had done. The neighbors who had found the pieces of the house blown out onto the road and found them both there and brought them to their house. She told them they were married so she could stay close and care for him in the room where she was sleeping on the bare floor, all of the house's extra bedding wrapped around him. He didn't know what to say and they both sat in silence. She finally asked him if he remembered transforming, and he told her he didn't.

"Can you believe it listened to me? What does that mean?" He said he didn't know. Because he honestly had no idea how such a thing was even possible.

"I'm sorry," he whispered and laid his hand on her head. "Were you scared?"

She nodded and sobbed into his chest and they stayed like that for some time. When she lifted up her head he brushed her cheek with the back of his shaky hand. He looked at her for a second. "Is my box here?"

She nodded.

He closed his eyes and let out a sigh. "Do me a favor."

"Ok."

"Take out the bottom left drawer and behind it is a false panel. Wiggle at the corner to pop it loose. Bring me what's inside, please. Hurry."

"What is it?"

"A lot of opium."

O~O~O~O

_Thank you for reading!_


End file.
